Newt Gingrich: On the edge or over the line?
By: Jonathan Martin and Andy Barr and John F. Harris October 11, 2010 04:44 AM EST

In August, Newt Gingrich compared backers of a mosque near ground zero to Nazis putting up signs at the Holocaust museum. In September, there was his assertion that President Barack Obama is motivated by a “Kenyan anti-colonial” worldview. And early October already has brought a declaration that Democrats are “the party of food stamps.”

It has been a busy season for the former House speaker, who seems every few weeks to return to a playbook he first began using three decades ago: lobbing rhetorical grenades into the crowd and basking in the uproar that follows.

Gingrich is used to hearing gasps of outrage from his Democratic targets. But his latest provocations have also brought groans and rolled eyes from Republican quarters, where some prominent figures warn that Gingrich’s instinct for bombast is an obstacle to his being taken seriously as a party leader or a promising presidential contender in 2012.

The squirming on his own side highlights a predicament for Gingrich.

In some ways this should be his moment. The kind of harsh, attack-based politics that were novel when Gingrich first began specializing in them during the late 1970s have become in many ways the norm in the modern political media environment.

But some skeptics, including some Republicans who say they wish Gingrich well, contend that he has never learned the difference between going to the edge and going over it. Earlier this year he wrote that Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are part of a “secular-socialist machine” that is as dire a threat to the country now as Hitler’s Germany or the Soviet Union was in the past.

And Democrats suggest he has been trafficking so long in ostentatiously partisan statements — Bill Clinton recently called it Gingrich’s “shtick” — that he has devalued his own currency.

By these lights, one part of Gingrich’s brain is that of a strategist and intellectual — a person comfortable talking about history and ideas, on a constant search for the right language and themes to connect with voters.

But the other part is that of a man who lives always in the moment — addicted to overstatement, rarely pausing to consider whether the words that will get him attention today are consistent with what he said in the past or will advance his larger ambitions to recover from his 1990s setbacks and restore his standing as a major national leader.

Longtime observers say the two sides of Gingrich’s persona are in tension on a good day and in outright conflict on a bad. The recent comments linking Obama to colonial Africa and Democrats to food stamps sounded not simply anachronistic — the obsessions of an earlier generation — but also freighted with racial innuendo.

“He knows how to appeal to and arouse the conservative coalition,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “But he also has a tendency to go one stop further than he should.”

As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put it of the Gingrich approach: “The good news is it gets people to listen to you, but the bad news is your negatives go up.”

A longtime associate, former Rep. Vin Weber, said Gingrich knows that his sharp tongue can wound himself as well as his political opponents. The two men last week traveled on the campaign trail in Weber’s home state of Minnesota.

“He’s keenly aware of the fact ... that he has to be more disciplined if he wants to run for president,” said Weber. “He wants to try to discipline himself.”

Based on his conversations, Weber said there is “no doubt in my mind” that Gingrich hopes to be the GOP nominee in 2012: “He absolutely wants to run and I think intends to run.”

But supporters of Republicans Gingrich would potentially face in a GOP presidential primary believe the former speaker’s tendency to pop off heedlessly is a symptom of larger character flaws that will ultimately be fatal to his prospects.

“Two of the most important commodities in a candidate running for president are focus and discipline — and he’s got neither,” said an adviser to Mitt Romney of Gingrich. “He could be a great help [to the party] if he’d so choose, if he’d only help with messaging and ideas and be less of a provocateur. But that’s not what he wants to do.”

Gingrich’s longtime spokesman, Rick Tyler, offered a robust defense of his boss’s rhetoric and said leaders who speak bold truths often cause more timid listeners to recoil.

“They are the same people who were upset when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the ‘Evil Empire,’” he said, adding that FDR, too, “said some pretty provocative things in World War II.”

In any event, Tyler said, Gingrich won’t attempt to rein himself in if he chooses after the midterm elections to run for president.

With a laugh, Tyler asserted, “I think Newt Gingrich is gonna remain Newt Gingrich.” It is a fair bet.

The rush of speculation about Gingrich’s recent comments — what do they reveal about his likely next steps? — tends to miss the degree of continuity in his career. His latest rhetoric does not sound much different from things he has been saying for decades.

The Atlanta Constitution, which endorsed Gingrich in some of his early races, switched sides in 1978 after what it said was a campaign that had “gone beyond vigor and into demagoguery and plain lying.”

His invective in the 1980s tormented House Speakers Tip O’Neill (who complained that a Gingrich speech on the House floor calling Democrats appeasers was “the lowest thing I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress”) and Jim Wright (who later wrote that, “at heart, Gingrich is a nihilist” who across his career “has been intent on destroying and demoralizing the existing order”).

During the Clinton era, he said Bill and Hillary Clinton were “the enemy of normal Americans,” and shortly after the GOP won control of Congress in 1994, he went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to allege that he had heard from an unnamed law enforcement official that “up to a quarter of the White House staff … had used drugs in the last four or five years.”

Gingrich at times has lost his sense of proportion. A now mostly forgotten controversy over Asian money sources in Clinton’s presidential reelection campaign was described by Gingrich in 1997 as “the opening phase of what will turn into being the largest scandal in American history.”

The next year, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Gingrich said the issue was not sex but Clinton’s alleged perjury and vowed, “I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic.”

As it happened, Gingrich was not speaker for much longer. The emphasis on Clinton’s scandals backfired, causing Republicans to oust him. Later it came to light that Gingrich was having an affair with the woman who is now his wife during the time he was excoriating Clinton.

More than a decade later, Obama and Pelosi have provided Gingrich with new lyrics to a familiar tune. He has played it in books and on his platform as a commentator on Fox News. In a speech last spring, he said Obama is “the most radical president in American history.” The “secular-socialist” values he and other top Democrats stand for, he argued in his most recent book, represent “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

For all his impassioned words, and all his reputation as a farsighted strategist, Gingrich’s political prescriptions can sometimes be hard to follow. At times — as with his backing of liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava over Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in a widely watched House special election in New York — he has lectured his own party’s right, “If you want to have a conservative majority in Washington, part of that majority’s going to make you uncomfortable.” At the same time, on his Twitter feed, he trumpeted Christine O’Donnell’s Senate nomination in Delaware: “The elite media wants to declare her unelectable — nonsense — she won.”

In an interview with POLITICO last November, Gingrich advised that Republicans should treat Obama’s coming legislative victory on health care just “like his Nobel Prize,” i.e., shrugging it off as much ado about nothing. Not long afterward, though, he had reversed course, calling the health care bill “the most corrupt legislation I have seen in my lifetime” and speaking favorably of how most Republicans would vote to repeal it if they win back Congress.

If not always consistent in detail, Gingrich’s flair for flamboyant words has kept him relevant in a way few would have predicted when he left office a dozen years ago.

“He keeps 'em stirred up,” said former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Gingrich, who he allows has “done a pretty good job of resurrecting himself.”

“He has a good political antenna,” said Graham, who served with Gingrich in the House and was part of a group of Republicans who tried to mount a coup against him. “And he understands that our base finds President Obama’s agenda completely out of bounds.”

But Graham, alluding to the Kenya comment, said “sometimes he tries to explain to our base what makes President Obama tick and he goes too far.”

“That’s what I worry about in our primary — we’re going to trip over ourselves trying to be more outrageous.”

Tyler, the Gingrich spokesman, said only those who think in racial terms could be offended by such references — “if you have race on your mind when you’re thinking about it,” as he put it.

Cole, told that Gingrich can say some provocative things, unleashed a sustained laugh. “Oh, you think?” said the Oklahoman, a former political operative who has known Gingrich for decades. “It has been a part of his persona for a long time; this is nothing new.”

For all the criticism he takes, Gingrich retains his share of admirers within the GOP. Some of those who have served with him say his talents are as immense as his flaws.

“If this was a referendum on Sunday School Teacher of the Year or Husband of the Year, he’s not going to win,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican. “But he can put forth a vision in a way like nobody else can.”

Even a skeptic like Graham said: “He was the most motivating guy I’ve ever met.”

Bob Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman and one of his chief lieutenants in the House, noted that Gingrich has always operated as an insurgent, from his status as an early Republican in the heavily Democratic Georgia of the 1970s through his backbench battles against the get-along-go-along House GOP leadership personified by former Minority Leader Bob Michel.

“His entire political career, he was a constant outsider,” said Walker, who is still close to Gingrich. “In the '80s and '90s, he was as much opposed to the Republican establishment as to the Democratic establishment.”

Not surprisingly, establishment figures of both parties tend to look askance at him still.

Colin Powell, appearing last month on “Meet the Press,” responded to questions about the Kenya comments by suggesting coolly that Gingrich just wants attention: “Mr. Gingrich does these things from time to time, with a big, bold statement. ... He does it, occasionally, to make news and also [to] stir up dust."

Bill Clinton, on the same program, said much the same. “That's just what he does when he's running,” the former president said. “He's out there, playing politics, and it's his shtick. He knows better. He's a smart man."

And yet Gingrich is like Clinton in his durability — the Republican Party’s own survivor.

As Cole asked, “How many former speakers are still relevant politically after they’ve been speaker? Most just fade away.”